This week’s Sunday Stealing is from Ned the Duck and is Name your favorite
Name your favorite:
Place: it’s probably Niagara Falls. I’ve not tired of it. When I was a kid, I went there more than once. My wife and I traveled there for an anniversary (and a work meeting, which helped subsidize the trip), pre-daughter. Then my wife, daughter, and I stopped there in 2011 during a massive trip to Ontario.
Color: It waffles between green (of course) and blue. I suppose it depends on the particular iteration.
Smell: Bacon. The smell of bacon is better than the taste of bacon.
Magazine: I used to LOVE magazines: Life, Time, Newsweek, Ebony, Jet, Psychology Today, Billboard… Now, I receive The Week, which has GREAT covers. But I stopped getting a lot of magazines, notably The New Yorker because I wasn’t reading them. I AM still getting Vanity Fair, but I don’t read that either, though I’m more likely to view it online. I am consuming The Hollywood Reporter online; my current favorite article: For the first time, Disney is seeking damages in the [Florida] state court case initiated by [Governor Ron DeSantis’] handpicked oversight board.
Texture: Satin sheets, I suppose.
What’s “bored”?
Thing to do when bored: I’m seldom bored. But I’ll play Backgammon on my phone when I need a brain cleanser.
Precious stone: Ruby. It’s the stone of my wife and one of my sisters. My wife’s wedding ring has some ruby in it.
Animal: The peacock. I took a picture of one at the Catskill Game Farm (RIP), and I liked it. It also reminds me of the song My Conviction from the musical Hair.
Time in history: 1978. It’s when all of the good things from the Warren Supreme Court were in place, and it was before Reaganomics started actively taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Also, the earth wasn’t yet on fire.
Font: I haven’t given it much thought, but I’ll say Helvetica.
Sound: The inverse pedal point in music, which I wrote about here. Honorable mention goes to three women singing together in harmony. Example: the chorus of Telling Me Lies by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris.
Fruit: Strawberry.
Vegetable: Spinach. Popeye indoctrination. But canned spinach is an abomination.
Store/shop: Probably Stewart’s, the convenience store all over the Albany area. I like their ice cream. And the larger stores in the burbs are some of the few places you can find a public bathroom that has a chance to be relatively clean.
The late Archie
Quote: “You have the right to live better. You have the right to a better life. You have the right to live in a society without the systems put in that keep us fighting against each other. There’s a better way.” – Archie, a legendary guy in the Albany area who died unexpectedly this week. Here’s his Stand Against Racism website.
Historical figure: Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), who was alive when I was born. Her death was the first of a Very Important Person I can remember, though I didn’t know WHY, other than she was FDR’s widow; I later learned she was SO much more than that. My family visited her residence at Val-Kill in 2013.
Letter: the cursive letter G, which I wrote a lot in my life, of course, because the capitalized form was SO different than the lower-case letter.
Memory: the time I spent with my father in Savannah, GA, 1998. He loved the city, and it was time for us, without my mom or sisters. Two years later, he died.
Dessert: fruit pie (apple, cherry, blueberry) a la mode, with a good vanilla ice cream.
Candy: either a Mounds bar or a York Pettermint Patty to consume. But to play with, M&Ms because I would separate them by color and then eat them in rainbow order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, brown).
Fine dining
Restaurant: It’s difficult to say. They’re either defunct (Lombardo’s) or have declined. I’ll pick Kismet, the Mediterranean place at the corner of Madison Avenue and S. Allen Street in Albany in my neighborhood, partly because my wife and I stopped by the day it opened. We didn’t dine there then because we had already eaten, but a few days later, my wife and I ate there for our anniversary.
Language: on one level, I love the sound of some Romance languages, notably French and Italian. On the other hand, German has wonderfully descriptive and lengthy words such as treppenwitz.
The thing to learn about: I’m still a Census Bureau nerd – or is it a geek? -especially when it comes to demographic designations. There’s a webinar scheduled for August 30 at 3:00 pm EDT on the potential removal of the Ancestry question from the American Community Survey. The webinar is a chance to provide feedback on removing this question and its impact on data users. I’ll attend this if I don’t have a conflict.
The thing about yourself: I remain curious. No way do I think I know all of the answers. And I still learn something new almost daily.